By Mike Whitney
“The Ukrainians
are in bad shape… It won’t be long before
the Ukrainians run out of food. It won’t be
long before they freeze… They have done all
that we can reasonably expect them to do.
It’s time to negotiate…. before the
offensive begins, because once it begins,
there will be no further discussion between
Moscow and Kiev until it is over to the
satisfaction of the Russians.”
Colonel Douglas MacGregor, “War
in Ukraine; Quiet Before the Storm”, 15
minute-mark
“Strictly
speaking, we haven’t started anything yet.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin
November 21, 2022:
Information Clearing House
-- "UNZ"
- The
relentless attacks on Ukraine’s electrical grid,
fuel-storage units, railway hubs, and
Command-and-Control centers mark the beginning
of a second and more lethal phase of the war.
The increased tempo of the high-precision,
long-range missile attacks suggests that Moscow
is laying the groundwork for a major winter
offensive that will be launched as soon as
Russia’s 300,000 reservists join their
formations in east Ukraine. Kiev’s refusal to
negotiate a settlement that addresses Russia’s
core security concerns, has left Russian
president Vladimir Putin with no other option
but to defeat Ukrainian forces on the
battlefield and impose a settlement through
force-of-arms. The impending winter
offensive is designed to deliver the knock-out
punch Russia needs to achieve its strategic
objectives and bring the war to swift end.
This is from Reuters:
Russian missile
strikes have crippled almost half of
Ukraine’s energy system, the government
said on Friday, and authorities in the
capital Kyiv warned that the city could
face a “complete shutdown” of the power grid
as winter sets in.
With temperatures
falling and Kyiv seeing its first snow,
officials were working to restore power
nationwide after some of the heaviest
bombardment of Ukrainian civilian
infrastructure in nine months of war.
The United Nations
says Ukraine’s electricity and water
shortages threaten a humanitarian disaster
this winter.
“Unfortunately Russia
continues to carry out missile strikes on
Ukraine’s civilian and critical
infrastructure. Almost half of our energy
system is disabled,” Prime Minister Denys
Shmyhal said….
“We are preparing
for different scenarios, including a
complete shutdown,” Mykola Povoroznyk,
deputy head of the Kyiv city administration,
said in televised comments.” (“Ukraine
says half its energy system crippled by
Russian attacks, Kyiv could ‘shutdown'”,
Reuters)
Until recently, Russia
had avoided targets that would dramatically
impact civilian activities, but now military
leaders have returned to a more conventional
approach. Presently, the military is destroying
whatever facilities, transformers, storage
units, substations, rail yards and energy depots
that allow Ukraine to continue to wage war.
Clearly –as the bigger and more powerful state
— it was always within Russia’s ability to
take a sledgehammer to Ukraine and break it into
a million pieces, but Putin chose to hold back
hoping that Kiev would come to its senses and
see the hopelessness of its cause. And
–despite the deluge of western propaganda to the
contrary– the outcome of this war has never been
in doubt. Russia is going to impose a
settlement on Kiev and that settlement will
require the government to cut all ties with NATO
and to sign a treaty declaring its neutrality
into perpetuity. Russia is not going to allow a
hostile military alliance to place its missile
sites and combat troops on its western flank.
That won’t happen.
Unfortunately, Russia’s
military operation is going to greatly increase
the suffering of the Ukrainian people who find
themselves locked in a cage-match between the
Washington and Moscow. This is from the World
Socialist Web Site:
Poverty in Ukraine
has increased more than tenfold since the
outbreak of the US/NATO-Russia war,
according to the latest data from the World
Bank (WB). Officially, 25 percent of the
country’s population is now poor, up from
supposedly just 2 percent before February
2022… With officials predicting that the
poverty rate could rise to as much as 60
percent or more next year, levels of
deprivation are emerging in Ukraine that
have not been witnessed on the European
continent since the end of World War II.
Unemployment is now
running at 35 percent, and salaries have
fallen by as much as 50 percent over the
spring and summer for some categories of
workers. … according to the International
Monetary Fund, Ukraine’s public debt has now
soared to 85 percent of GDP…. A recently
released joint study by the World Health
Organization and Ukraine’s Ministry of
Health found that 22 percent of people in
Ukraine cannot access essential medicines.
For the country’s 6.9 million internally
displaced, that number rises to 33 percent.
…The medications
that are hardest to get—those that treat
blood pressure, heart problems and pain, as
well as sedatives and antibiotics—reveal a
population struggling to cope with decades
of poverty-induced ill health and the
physical and psychological trauma of war.
While US and NATO
officials are able to dispatch massive
amounts of firepower to Ukraine’s front
lines within a matter of weeks, the delivery
of life-saving humanitarian goods is
seemingly an impossible logistical
challenge.” (“Poverty
skyrockets in Ukraine”, World Socialist
Web Site)
Washington’s proxy-war on
Moscow has inflicted incalculable suffering on
the people of Ukraine who now face plunging
temperatures, dwindling food supplies, a
crashing economy and a growing shortage of
essential medications. And despite the
chest-thumping bravado over the recapturing of
Kherson, the Ukrainian people will now be forced
to flee their battered homeland by the millions
seeking refuge in Europe which has already
slipped into a post-industrial slump brought on
by Uncle Sam’s reckless provocations. How
many of these working-class Ukrainians would
have preferred that their leaders reach an
accommodation with Putin (regarding his
legitimate security concerns) rather than
engaging the Russian army in a pointless war
which has cost them their homes, their jobs,
their cities, and (for many) their lives?
And do the people outside the country who claim
to “Stand With Ukraine” realize that they are
actually supporting the impoverishment and
immiseration of millions of civilians that are
caught in a geopolitical crossfire between
Washington and Russia? Anyone who genuinely
cares about Ukraine should support Ukrainian
neutrality and an end to NATO expansion. That is
the only way this war is going to end. Russian
security will be achieved by-way of a treaty or
an iron-fist. The choice is Ukraine’s. This
is from an article titled ‘Russia
Is Right: The U.S. Is Waging a Proxy War in
Ukraine‘:
“The war in Ukraine
isn’t just a conflict between Moscow and
Kyiv, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov
recently declared. It is a “proxy war” in
which the world’s most powerful military
alliance … is using Ukraine as a battering
ram against the Russian state … Lavrov
is … not wrong. Russia is the target of one
of the most ruthlessly effectively proxy
wars in modern history.”
The US foreign policy
establishment does not care about Ukraine or the
Ukrainian people. The country is merely a
launching pad for Washington’s war on Russia.
That is why the CIA toppled the
democratically-elected government in Kiev in
2014 and that is why the CIA armed and trained
Ukrainian paramilitaries to fight the Russian
military in 2015 (7 years before the invasion!)
Here’s some background from a 2015 article at
Yahoo News:
“The CIA is
overseeing a secret intensive training
program in the U.S. for elite Ukrainian
special operations forces and other
intelligence personnel, according to
five former intelligence and national
security officials familiar with the
initiative. The program, which started in
2015, is based at an undisclosed facility in
the Southern U.S., according to some of
those officials….
“The United States
is training an insurgency,” said a former
CIA official, adding that the program has
taught the Ukrainians how “to kill
Russians.”
…the CIA and other
U.S. agencies could support a Ukrainian
insurgency, should Russia launch a
large-scale incursion.
…“We’ve been
training these guys now for eight years.
They’re really good fighters.
…representatives from both countries also
believe that Russia won’t be able to hold on
to new territory indefinitely because of
stiff resistance from Ukrainian insurgents,
according to former officials.
If the Russians
launch a new invasion, “there’s going to be
people who make their life miserable,” said
the former senior intelligence official…
“All that stuff
that happened to us in Afghanistan,” said
the former senior intelligence official,
“they can expect to see that in spades with
these guys.” (“CIA-trained
Ukrainian paramilitaries may take central
role if Russia invades”, Yahoo News)
There it is in black and
white. The plan to use Ukraine as a
staging-ground for conducting a proxy-war on
Russia preceded the invasion by at least 7
years. The Obama administration and their neocon
allies set a trap for Russia in order to drag
them into an Afghanistan-like quagmire that
would deplete their resources and kill as many
Russian servicemen as possible. As Defense
Secretary Lloyd Austin recently admitted, the US
wants to “weaken” Russia so it is unable to
project power beyond its borders. Washington
seeks unhindered access to Central Asia so it
can encircle China with military bases and
nuclear missiles. The US intends to control
China’s growth while dominating the world’s most
populous and prosperous region of the next
century, Asia. But first, Washington must
crush Russia, collapse its economy, isolate it
from the global community, demonize it in its
media, and topple its leaders. Ukraine is seen
as the first phase in a much broader strategy
aimed at regime change (in Moscow) followed by
the forced fragmentation of the Russian state.
The ultimate objective is the preservation of
Washington’s preeminent role in the global
order.
Putin’s winter offensive
threatens to derail Washington’s plan to drag
the conflict out for as long as possible. In the
weeks and months ahead, Russia is going to
intensify its assault on Ukraine’s critical
infrastructure. Most of the country will be
plunged into darkness, fuel supplies will dry
up, food and water will become scarcer,
communications will be cut off, and all
rail-traffic will cease. Millions of civilians
will flee to Europe while the entire country
slowly grinds to a standstill. At the same time
that Russian battalions overtake cities and
towns east of the Dnieper, the Russian army will
block vital supply-lines from Poland cutting off
the flow of lethal weaponry and combat troops
headed to the front. This, in turn, will lead to
widespread capitulation among Ukrainian fighting
units operating in the field which will force
Zelensky to the negotiating table. Eventually,
Russia will prevail and its legitimate security
demands will be met. Here’s how Colonel Douglas
MacGregor summed it up in a recent interview:
“What’s coming in
the future is a very massive offensive...
the kind of offensive that I and many other
military analysts expected at the beginning;
Very decisive operations, multiple
operational axes designed to effectively
annihilate the enemy on the ground. And
that’s what’s coming now, that’s what lies
in the future.” (Colonel
Douglas MacGregor, “War in Ukraine;
Quiet Before the Storm”, you tube)
When the ground freezes,
Russia’s offensive will begin.
Views expressed in this article are
solely those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
in this article are
solely those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
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